Books on a Ramone, the Algonquin Set and Weegee’s New York

Marc Bell grew up in Crown Heights, the grandson of the head chef at ‘21’ and son of a longshoreman. He and his twin brother shuttled to nursery school in a converted Cadillac hearse. In 1961, when he was 9, he got a transistor radio (AM only) as a Christmas gift, and by the time he was 13, as a self-taught drummer, he started a band that began playing gigs at Ditmas Junior High and eventually worked its way out of the neighborhood.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or autobiography, if you follow the Brooklyn boy’s collaboration with several unrelated young men from Forest Hills, Queens, who adopted their surname as a tribute to Paul McCartney (who called himself Paul Ramone briefly with the Silver Beetles) in the 1970s to become the breakthrough punk band the Ramones.

In “Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone” (Touchstone), by Marky Ramone (with Rich Herschalg), the former Mr. Bell traces his evolution from a struggling student at Erasmus Hall High School to an enduring rock star, recovered alcoholic, satellite radio disc jockey, purveyor of pasta sauce and beer (and surviving “brother” among Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy).

“Sometime between the ’70s and today,” he writes, “the music we made by the seat of our pants against all odds somehow became ‘timeless.’ ”

Another New York group that would have registered considerably lower on an audiometer but higher on a pH test (the Ramones were punk, after all, not acid rock) has generated a rich literary legacy since it convened for the first time in 1919. The latest addition is “The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide” (Globe Pequot Press), by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society.

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory,” the columnist Franklin P. Adams once wrote, and Mr. Fitzpatrick deftly mines a cornucopia of recollections to recreate the self-styled Vicious Circle that began one day as a press agent’s practical joke played on The New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott.

This delightful illustrated reminiscence profiles the full cast of wits who defined cosmopolitan culture through the 1920s and leads readers on a revealing tour of their haunts.

The New York world of Weegee — the pseudonym of Usher Fellig, “the documentarian of urban calamity” — was a far cry from the gentility of the Algonquin or the future gentrification of the photographer’s stamping ground. Drawing largely on the International Center of Photography’s collection, Philomena Mariani and Christopher George have compiled “The Weegee Guide to New York” (DelMonico Books), a gritty reminder of street life in the ’30s and ’40s.

They write that Weegee captured the city’s “inhabitants navigating through street chaos without the protective shield of mobile devices and earphones.”